es be more faithfully enforced between aliens
than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight
always; and when, after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you
cease fighting, the identical old questions, as to terms of intercourse,
are again upon you."

There is no line, straight or crooked, suitable for a national boundary
upon which to divide. Trace through, from east to west, upon the line
between the free and slave country, and we shall find a little more than
one third of its length are rivers, easy to be crossed, and populated,
or soon to be populated, thickly upon both sides; while nearly all its
remaining length are merely surveyors' lines, over which people may walk
back and forth without any consciousness of their presence. No part of
this line can be made any more difficult to pass by writing it down on
paper or parchment as a national boundary. The fact of separation, if it
comes, gives up on the part of the seceding section the fugitive-slave
clause along with all other constitutional obligations upon the section
seceded from, while I should expect no treaty stipulation would ever be
made to take its place.

But there is another difficulty. The great interior region bounded east
by the Alleghenies, north by the British dominions, west by the Rocky
Mountains, and south by the line along which the culture of corn and
cotton meets, and which includes part of Virginia, part of Tennessee,
all of Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri,
Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and the Territories of Dakota, Nebraska, and part
of Colorado, already has above 10,000,000 people, and will have 50,000,000
within fifty years if not prevented by any political folly or mistake.
It contains more than one third of the country owned by the United
States--certainly more than 1,000,000 square miles. Once half as populous
as Massachusetts already is, it would have more than 75,000,000 people. A
glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the great
body of the Republic. The other parts are but marginal borders to it, the
magnificent region sloping west from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific
being the deepest and also the richest in undeveloped resources. In the
production of provisions, grains, grasses, and all which proceed from them
this great interior region is naturally one of the most important in the
world. Ascertain from statistics the small proportion of the region